Due diligence for deforestation-free supply chainswith Sentinel-2 imagery from the Copernicus DataSpace Ecosystem 

At COP26, the Glasgow Leaders Declaration committed the majority of the world’s nations toending deforestation by 2030. On 29 June 2023, the EU Regulation on deforestation-freeproducts (EU) 2023/1115 entered into force. The main driver of deforestation and forestdegradation is the expansion of agricultural land for the production of commodities like cattle,wood, cocoa, soy, palm oil, coffee, rubber and derived products. Any trader wishing to sell thesecommodities on the EU single market or export from within it, must prove that the products donot originate from recently deforested land or have contributed to forest degradation.Satellite imagery provides the means of addressing the implementation of the EU Regulationon deforestation-free supply chains, and of strengthening forest governance through theprovision of timely information to national forest services. We present the PyEO near-real-timeforest alert system from Sentinel-2, a current operational application to reduce illegal logging inKenya, and its potential to support im- and exporters in demonstrating deforestation-free supplychains developed by the ForestMind project.The software implementation used the Python for Earth Observation (PyEO) library toautomatically extract information on forest loss from Sentinel-2 satellite imagery. It queries theCopernicus Data Space Ecosystem for new imagery, downloads the automatically selectedSentinel-2 images, applies a previously trained random forest machine learning model to detectforest loss, and generates a multi-layer analyst report.For the forest law enforcement in Kenya, the latest forest alerts are sifted and prioritised bythe Kenya Forest Service’s Forest Information Centre in Nairobi, and delegated to forest rangersin the field for investigation. Forest rangers navigate to the field site inside the forest reserve,accompanied by a local community scout, and report back to head office with their observationsand whether any arrests for illegal logging were made. Since its introduction in Kwale County in2019, over 2000 forest alerts have been investigated. The dominant cause of the deforestation isillegal logging, followed by charcoal production.For the due diligence application, a Forest Analyst can then use the analyst-report andadditional software tools to create company reports suitable for communication to im- andexporters for monitoring the impact of their supply chains on deforestation and forestdegradation.